Advisory committee for environmental research and education september 12, 2012

[laughter]

But we -- hopefully that will all work. And she’ll also tell you about the alliance, which is a joint strategy, among the partners you can see various international groups at the bottom, in order to try to mitigate hazardous global environment change, environmental change and adapt to it, so that’s a very exciting strategic partnership that’s just getting off the ground, and she’ll fill you in on that.

So, I think that’s plenty to sort of remind you of what’s been going on, and to give you a little preview of some of the things that will be coming up later today and tomorrow. So, hopefully that’s gotten questions stirring that Joe will answer.

[laughter]

DR. TRAVIS: Right, thanks Marge. We’ve been joined by a number of people from NSF, and could I ask them to introduce themselves, so we know who you are, and Upmanu on the phone knows who you are, and who’s in the room?

DR. HAMILTON: Bruce Hamilton, Engineering Directorate.

DR. CONOVER: David Conover, director of Division of Ocean Sciences and Geo.

DR. CAMPBELL: I’m Dave Campbell, I’m a program director of the Education Directorate.

DR. LALL: Excuse me, but I’m not able to hear.

DR. TRAVIS: Can we pass that one? Is that one --

DR. CAVANAUGH: I’m trying to.

DR. TRAVIS: Upmanu, we’re going to try and get a wireless mic that we can pass around. We’ve also been joined by David Blockstein. David.

DR. BLOCKSTEIN: Morning.

MS. ZELENSKI: Okay, we’ll try again with the NSF. DR. TRAVIS: All right. Here come, yeah, here come the NSF people.

DR. Campbell: Hi, I’m Dave Campbell, I’m a program officer in the Education Directorate.

DR. CONOVER: Should I go again?

DR. TRAVIS: Oh yeah.

DR. CONOVER: David Conover, director of Division of Ocean Science and Geo.

DR. TRAVIS: You did it so well the first time; I wanted to hear it again.

DR. HAMILTON: Bruce Hamilton, Engineering Directorate.

DR. SPANGLER: I’m Keith Spangler, a [unintelligible] in GEO.

DR. MEACHEM: Steve Meacham, Office of Integrative Activities.

DR. ROBIN: Jessica Robin, Geoscience Directorate. MS. NAUS: Wendy Naus, I’m a member of the public with Northeastern University.

DR. TESSIER: Alan Tessier, in the Division of Environmental Biology.

MS. DYBAS: Cheryl Dybas, Office Legislative and public Affairs.

DR. DAVIES: Terry Davies, Geosciences, front office.

DR. TRAVIS: Thank you, everyone. Upmanu, do you anything you would like to add, or questions for Marge, or --

DR. LALL: No, no, I think this is wonderful; I appreciate you giving their update.

DR. TRAVIS: Okay, I wanted to give you first chance because we can’t see you raising your hand.

DR. LALL: Sure. I appreciate that.

DR. TRAVIS: Floor’s open for questions or discussion. Tony?

DR. JANETOS: Marge, when you showed the three, what did you call them, strategic goals, or program goals for 2013, I was struck by the first one, about establishing policies for access to data and products. Mostly I was struck because it’s so modest.

[laughter]

DR. CAVANAUGH: Ah.

DR. JANETOS: I mean, you know, other scientists agencies have had policies for this in place for 20 years. What’s -- why is it so modest? Two programs will have policies in place for public access to data and products, or something like that.

DR. CAVANAUGH: I think it’s maybe one that -- okay, well, I don’t think it’s so modest, necessarily. Because there are a lot of issues -- this has to do with the data. This has to do with -- which isn’t necessarily, you know, which isn’t publications, you know. So, I think there are a lot of issues related to this one in terms of capacity, et cetera. So, and, so -- my impression is that, you know, the director is very -- I think he’s very proactive really on this topic of having open access. And you can go back and talk with him later about how he -- why he’s, you know, I think he goes well beyond the two data intensive scientific domains in his thinking. But this was written up as something that you’re going to -- as an accountability thing. This is in the part of the budget where you’re going to demonstrate that you did such and so. DR. JANETOS: Right.

DR. CAVANAUGH: So, I think that maybe that accounts for some of the modest nature of it.

DR. JANETOS: I agree entirely with the intent --

DR. CAVANAUGH: Yeah.

DR. JANETOS: -- it’s a very low bar, which many of your other federal colleagues jumped over a very long time ago.

[laughter]

DR. CAVANAUGH: Well, I’m not sure that that’s -- well, we have a lot of data that’s actually open as well. And actually we have put out a -- there was a Dear Colleague letter, that we put out about a year or two ago that actually required people with NSF grants in order to make their data public. So, we’ve actually met this bar already, you know, so, but at the time that the budget was put together, you know, it appeared in ‘12 as well as ‘13. I think it, you know, it might seem like what was going to be able to be done in the next few months or something.

But I think that the director’s thinking about open access goes well beyond this. And then once you do that, it does get into areas that are difficult, I think, with -- particularly with publishers.

DR. TRAVIS: Stephanie?

MS. PFIRMAN: Being on the same slide, I’m curious about the second point, which is interesting. The first time I read it, I thought that 80 percent of institutions were actually using proven instructional practices, but it’s actually they’re documenting how much they’re using those, or yes or no, or what extent?

DR. CAVANAUGH: Yeah.

MS. PFIRMAN: How will that information be collected, or how is that information being collected?

DR. CAVANAUGH: Oh, Jill’s left. If she has any ideas about that -- well, a lot of that has to come in through a -- maybe Dave knows more about how you might collect this. But basically in annual reports -- in proposals and in annual reports, you have to justify, you know.

MS. PFIRMAN: I mean the standard annual report format doesn’t ask that question, so I was just curious how that was being collected.

DR. CAVANAUGH: Exactly, exactly. So this -- the ways to go on being able to do this, you know. I think a lot -- what a lot of people are doing now is related to assessing educational activities, you know. And therefore, being able to say something about what worked and what didn’t work. I think we’re sort of at that stage, and that’s being done quite a lot. But I think this next stage is just kind of saying that we’re, you know, we’re going out from there and we’re making a -- making it more of, what shall we say, more of an expectation you know for the university community. That that’s would be what they’re doing. We have some -- there is a -- there is some activity from within NSF in terms of trying to figure out internal ways of doing this. At least on the front end of proposals, that in another words, that when you submitted, you know, a proposal, wouldn’t have to say well, we’re going to do this and this, and the reason why we’re going to do it this way, is that this is a proven methodology. So I know that is going on on the front end. They’ve been doing a lot of thinking about that. But it’s a challenge, it’s a big challenge.

DR. TRAVIS: David?

DR. BLOCKSTEIN: Morning Marge, could you talk a little bit more please, about the E Squared, and where that is. One of the issues last time that Tim talked about was that there would be at least some stake within E Squared that would be focused in on the interdisciplinary environmental component to -- challenged us, to help him come up with ideas, and I don’t think we were particularly good at it, and so I am just kind of wondering where that stands right now.

DR. CAVANAUGH: Well we didn’t hear from you and so --

[laughter]

No, well actually there is a team that’s working on E Squared, and I happen to be on that team actually, and it’s gone through an interesting evolution I think, as program officers have tried to work on how they would actually, you know, what you would actually ask for specifically in solicitation, and how you would -- see one of the issues being how would you prove -- how would you get to a proven kinds of methodologies. At this point, I would say that the focus has, for E Squared, is most likely going to be at the undergraduate level. And I think it will be highly interdisciplinary, and I think there will be a very strong emphasis on evaluation and on using these proven methodologies. And so I think that it will probably, I don’t know, but will probably end up being a broad umbrella that has those characteristics, and within that I think there’s a lot of room for work related to sustainability and to environment, okay. But, so -- but I think, my -- this is my projection, I don’t know, but from what I can see happening on that committee, I think that it’ll be open, it’ll be a little bit more open than saying you have to. It will be only on sustainability, but it will be highly oriented towards interdisciplinary, and under graduate, and evaluation as strong components. So keep thinking about those things because there’ll be lots of opportunity, and it would be very good to see a lot of proposals along those lines, the sustainability and environmental line.

DR. BLOCKSTEIN: Just follow up for a second. And what’s your sense of the timing of that, if you do get a six month --

DR. CAVANAUGH: Solicitation out?

DR. BLOCKSTEIN: Yeah. I mean if you do get a six month CR, does that mean you have to wait until that’s decided or...

DR. CAVANAUGH: I know.

[laughter]

I know, well but, what Dave is referring to is the fact that you generally are constrained from starting, you know, brand new programs under continuing resolutions. So I don’t know. It remains to be seen. A lot of what we do in education I think is, you know, it’s consistent with programs that we’ve had in the past, so it becomes a sort of a -- maybe it could be released and maybe it couldn’t. So, it isn’t a great answer, but I don’t think it’s a definite no that you’d have to wait all the way through.

DR. BROWN: Careful definition.

DR. TRAVIS: Got it, okay.

DR. BROWN: That’s what we do.

[laughter]

It’s all about continuing where you’ve always been.

DR. TRAVIS: Lil and then Bruce.

MS. ALESSA: So this is not specifically for Marge, but it’s for everybody in the room. Recently there was a discussion about maybe mandate policies of NSF regarding products from NSF-funded research, those being public access, open source, open access, and another group in the room said, well no, NSF wants all products to be commercialized and patented, and so there was quite a bit of confusion, and it turned out it’s quite wide spread. So could somebody help us here and I can take it back to them? I’m just looking at [unintelligible] from the bottom. Now, so in which cases --

DR. CAVANAUGH: Maybe Bruce can help with this with -- the engineers can help with this, but I do -- my impression is that there hasn’t been a big change in the fact that when something’s federally funded by NSF, then it’s available. Yes.

MS. ALESSA: Okay, good.

DR. CAVANAUGH: So, but Bruce, are there some --

[talking simultaneously]

DR. HAMILTON: I don’t have any real clarification on this because actually I’m not fully grasping what was said.

So I don’t have a grip on what was said, but in terms of NSF wanting everything patented, that is certainly not the case. Are you referring to a specific -- or I’m sorry, was what you are referring to any specific program?

DR. ALESSA: This refers to a specific category of research, which is in the area of software development, and the faculty at a university were under pressure by the university to patent software. The research was NSF funded, and so a group of others, myself included, were called in to sort of debate this, and it turned out that there was quite a bit of confusion, and this was a particularly good university. I then went back to my university, as well as two others, and asked them that that same confusion existed there as well.

DR. HAMILTON: Okay, well I’m expecting the confusion, I have confusion on this also, but that won’t stop me.

[laughter]

So first, you’re referring to software, which would be our CISE Directorate, or CISE Directorate, not Engineering Directorate, but that won’t stop me either. So my impression of software is as follows. Software moves very fast. In the area of software, I think that in certain areas it is questionable about how much a patent can really hold.

MS. ALESSA: Oh totally, oh yeah.

DR. HAMILTON: So, this whole question you’re bringing up -- first I have to admit it’s beyond my scope, but I think to get clarification on it, you would have to talk to our CISE Directorate, we’d also have to have a better grip on exactly what was said, by who.

DR. ALESSA: Yeah, which I can’t so --

DR. HAMILTON: Sorry I can’t be more be more responsive to that, but --

DR. ALESSA: Actually, Marge answered it. I think that’s what my understanding was, too.

DR. CAVANAUGH: Well I think in general -- but you can see, I mean, it’s related to Tony’s question in a way, in the first place, because you know, this idea of open access, you know, always carries with it this you know, how open and when does it have to be open, and does anyone have a right of first use, you know? So, but I think those are, you know, we’re running around and those areas, so.

DR. LOGAN: Well since the first two were mentioned I thought I’d go after the third one.

[laughter]

DR. CAVANAUGH: Why did I show this?

MS. LOGAN: I have two things. One is you mentioned the word “node” going from one node to three nodes, could you explain that a little bit more?

DR. CAVANAUGH: Oh well, you know, there’s going to be a talk about the Innovation Corp, and they can do that, but when this first started I think all of the training -- what happens then is that these groups of three, you know, a researcher, a student, entrepreneur and business -- a mentor -- those folks go for extensive kind of training, and I think it started with just having Stanford be the only place where training would happen. And I think they’re calling it now Node in that there will be other places -- I think there’s now a couple other places where that training is being offered. Georgia Tech, I think is one of them, and I don’t remember what the other one was.

DR. LOGAN: All right, and the second part of that was, and maybe we’ll hear about this later, what part of these grants are in the environmental -- would you say that, or businesses that might be around water/environmental whatever --

DR. CAVANAUGH: That’s a great question. I don’t know, and I don’t know if they tallied that kind of thing, but it’s a great question and you can ask that -- to run it down. They had a little, you know, sort of, I don’t know, sort of a poster session kind of thing, where a lot of these people came in and there were a couple that were there that were environmentally oriented. That would be really exciting. One had to do with actually with bionic charge, charge particles that were atmospheric and now they adapted the measurement capabilities for that system to some others that were in the electronics industry. Very Interesting.

DR. TRAVIS: Other questions from people who -- folks at the table? Upmanu, do you have anything spark your interest in the last 15, 20 minutes --

DR. LALL: No, it’s been interesting to listen to. Thanks very much for [unintelligible].

DR. TRAVIS: Okay, I’ll ask -- I’d like to follow up a little bit, Marge, if I may, on what Tony raised about that first part. Like Tony, I was pretty taken aback at the low bar. What do they mean -- what is a data intensive scientific domain? I mean, is this really designed -- is that criteria and I know this is one of these accountability criteria, right? I’m, you know, but what is a data intensive scientific domain? And the reason I ask --

DR. CAVANAUGH: Well I think GEO and BIO are two great examples --

DR. TRAVIS: Right, I guess my confusion is that every time I publish a paper the data go into a depository usually. For my discipline, sort of a dry out depository and it’s been that way for quite some time.

DR. CAVANAUGH: Right.

DR. TRAVIS: And so, and then, you know, anyone who wants the data are welcome to them at that point. But what is this actually, this data intensive scientific domain? Is that at the level of the directorate? Is that -- I can be more specific, the level of the program? The level of a type of award, et cetera?

DR. CAVANAUGH: I don’t think -- I don’t -- my impression is that you’re sort of overthinking this a little bit. I think that the scientific -- when they talk about a scientific domain, they were probably thinking more about, you know, division level kinds of activities, you know, would be my guess. That’s what they had on mind, where you could say, you know, environmental biology, there are a lot of different kinds of ways in which the data is stored, documented, archived, et cetera. But maybe if you pick out that whole set of environmental data as a domain.

DR. TRAVIS: Anything else anyone wants to raise? Otherwise we are about two minutes ahead of schedule and --

DR. CAVANAUGH: Yes, and I’ve given you about five questions to ask the director.

DR. TRAVIS: Yes.

DR. CAVANAUGH: So you’ve done a lot of your work for tomorrow already.

DR. TRAVIS: Okay, so I’m informed that Maria Uhle will be joining us, but she is in London, and so it will take a few minutes to set up the magic to allow her to be here holographically.

[laughter]

DR. TRAVIS: Which I imagine -- I hear is going to be a really impressive demonstration about NSF’s capabilities. Yeah, right in the middle of the table she’ll be speaking to us holographically.

Yes, James Bond and the queen will be coming with her. So, lets take a few minutes, lets take five minutes or 10 minutes or so while we set up the technology and make the magic happen.

[break]


International Updates

DR. UHLE: Okay.

DR. TRAVIS: All right, so, Maria, can you hear me? This is Joe Travis --

DR. UHLE: I can hear you perfectly.

DR. TRAVIS: Good, okay. So we’re in good shape. Maria, first of all, thank you very much for joining us all the way from London, and thank you for the effort to set up the technology so we can have some fun.

DR. UHLE: [laughs]

DR. TRAVIS: So with no further ado, Maria, I turn the floor over to you. Please carry on.

DR. UHLE: Okay. Well, thank you guys for indulging and dealing with all the technical difficulties here. We just finished the coastal -- or freshwater pre-proposal for the Belmont Forum and G8 Works Group. And we had a very successful meeting, and we are going to be sending several -- can you still hear? You can still hear me?

DR. TRAVIS: Yes, we can.

DR. UHLE: Okay, okay. So we will be sending several proposals to both -- to ask for invite for both proposals. So what I want to do is take you through the Belmont update; just give you some ideas about where we’re going in the future.

So for those of you who haven’t actually been on AC-ERE before or those who are not familiar with the Belmont forum, it’s actually one of the -- a group of world’s major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It was put together in June of 2009 by NSF, then-AD Tim Killeen, and the Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K. -- their Chief Executive Officer at the time, Alan Thorpe. And it was really to develop and move -- trying to help international collaboration for international GEC, or global environmental change research. And so they built on the existing IGFA frame, and it meant to be smaller, faster, and I hope -- hopefully a little bit more decision-making and action-oriented.

So the current membership that we have here, you can see that the countries and the funding agencies associated with those and then also the International Council for Science and the International Social Sciences Council. So you can see we have a pretty wide variety of countries. We bring in the global north and global south. And we have two countries, Austria and Norway, that are representative of the larger info group for the smaller countries, and so we work with them to try and bring in opportunities for funding.

So at the first meeting, the Belmont forum got together and they actually looked --

MALE SPEAKER: Maria?

DR. UHLE: -- at the national plans --

MALE SPEAKER: Maria?

DR. UHLE: -- that they all had for --

MALE SPEAKER: Maria?

DR. UHLE: -- environmental --

FEMALE SPEAKER: [laughs]

DR. UHLE: I’m sorry?

MALE SPEAKER: Maria? Are you forwarding the slides?

DR. UHLE: Yeah, I am. And they’re not forwarding with you guys? [laughs]

MALE SPEAKER: No, we’re still on the first one.

DR. UHLE: Oh, [laughs]. Hang on a second.

MALE SPEAKER: There they go.

DR. UHLE: Is that better?

MALE SPEAKER: That works.

MALE SPEAKER: Yeah.

MALE SPEAKER: Okay.

DR. UHLE: Okay, so I have to go from that end.

So there’s the current membership, and the major countries got together at Belmont House in Maryland in 2009 and they compared a lot of their strategic plans, and what we noticed right off the bat was there was a lot of overlap in terms of priorities but also existing programs. So out of that meeting came something called the Belmont Challenge, and that really is to look at delivering knowledge needed for action to help avoid and adapt to detrimental environmental change, including extreme events. A lot of this is really predicated on looking at things like risk assessments, impacts and vulnerabilities, and really trying to understand this on a regional decadal scale, and then also to benefit from and incorporate information on state of the art through advanced zerg [spelled phonetically] systems, and really the interaction of natural and social sciences. So this is actually one of the things we are really trying to push here in the next several years, especially through our new funding opportunities. And we really are happy to try and bring this information to service providers and users. And so this is really kind of the international aspect of NSF’s science, engineering, and education for sustainability of our SEES.

So we also really were concerned about how do we provide effective international coordination mechanisms and funding? So this is going to be an awkward slide, [laughs], because it has animation in it. But if I delete that, that might work. So the Belmont forum -- we’ve put together two international funding -- excuse me, one international funding call with two themes: coastal vulnerability and freshwater security. We launched those in March of 2012 and we just had our pre-proposal meeting, and we are going to have about 30 proposals that will go to full proposal invites for coastal vulnerability -- or excuse me, freshwater security, and then coastal vulnerability will be over the next several days. And the final decisions on proposals -- they’ll be due at end of December and then final decisions will be made probably in the March timeframe.

We have about €20 million at this point that are committed. And how we ended up doing this was we had originally looked at all the areas where we thought we had interest and programs where we could bring things together. And what we noticed was that freshwater security and coastal vulnerability were really ripe for international. So these were our first pilot tests, if you want. And so we had two scoping workshops, one in London and one in Paris, for coastal and freshwater where we brought together scientists and program officers from each of the different countries. And we actually requested people to kind of provide us with what their desired outcomes were, what research themes they thought were most important in terms of their national priorities, and what objectives, key questions, and, really, how can we organize these funding calls to facilitate access.